If you are following Cisco Unified computing solution, here is some good news. The latest firmware version 1.4 is officially support direct attach FCoE Storage protocol without require the additional SAN switch as previous version. Both Netapp and EMC are officially supported and certified to direct attach with the Cisco UCS without a SAN switch require. This will reduce the complex layer it require to deploy especially for those environment who are not FC users previously.

I found some very good post over the internet, you can refer the URL below for more information about the new update provided in Firmware 1.4

Unified Storage………Sounds new to you? or sounds familiar to you? No right or wrong answer here, but it had become the dream of every storage vendor to offer this to their client especially in mid range, enterprise and virtualization environment. I remembered Netapp was the 1st started this, follow by other competitors in the market.

What is unified storage?

A single platform support multi-protocol such as FC, ISCSI, NFS, CIFS, FCoE and etc. It also support file, volume and block level data access.

You will able to get the unified box from either Netapp, EMC and HDS in the market now.

Storage de-duplication is not a new term in the IT industry. It had been a while since few years back. Many users are confused with this term. Same goes to the Cloud Computing. Every Storage vendor will claim they have the de-duplication solution today, but they are different from each others as we know.

General de-duplication solution:

Primary SAN de-duplication

Appliance target base de-duplication

Host base de-duplication

Software base de-duplication

I may had missed out some of them, but these should cover majority of the de-deduplication solution in the market today.

I was busy setup the demo solution for the Cisco summit yesterday. The Demo we had were displaying the VMware, Cisco UCS, Nexus 5000, MDS 9124 & Netapp Storage Solution. 1 of the Surprise thing happened during the setup, which the power source for our MDS 9124 had been tripped during the installation yesterday. In this scenerio, all our connection to ESX host and VM were disconnected. It took us for 25 mins to recovered the power failure and the MDS Switch was back on line after that. I was thought to reboot all the ESX host as we are performing BOOT FROM SAN for all the ESX hosts that we setup. Surprise happened here, which I found all the ESX host were still continue running. I did the command uptime and check the system uptime from vcenter, it showed that the ESX host were not rebooted during the SAN connection drop from UCS to our Netapp FAS storage.

I further checked the virtual machines been power on in the ESX servers, which show all the VM were continue running without system crash or rebooted. Now I realize that the failure on SAN switch may not necessary result system crash or hung, in fact it may allow you resume the system state once the SAN switch are back online, of course, this is no guarantee assumption, just some surprise finding experienced yesterday would like to share here. Read more »